Viva La Vida
by Ersatz Writer
Summary: '... And then she saw his emerald tears - like the tears of England - glittering brightly as it fell into the night.' A time when England ruled the world - a puppet on a lonely string, a man who should never have wanted to be King. One-shot


**Disclaimer: Hetalia belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya**

'**Viva La Vida**' is a song by Coldplay, which inspired and provided the background music whilst I was writing this. :)

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><p><strong>30th June, 1997<strong>

**London**

She thought he walked very slowly for a man drenched in rain.

She could see him through the windows of the cafe, and he struck her as very odd at the time, for he did not hurry, nor seem to mind, at the grey liquid pelting down from the sky. Whilst others scurried around him, clutching at umbrellas and hats, he moved at leisure down the cobbled streets, blinking away the water that dripped occasionally down from his sandy hair. He had green eyes, lush and rich like the emeralds of India. And, as he paused at the door of the coffee shop, and looked in, their gazes touched, briefly, and she thought she saw a little something that was out of this world.

Then the bell jingled, and he walked in, breath clouding in the air. He brushed a hand through his hair, and wiped away the water that had beaded down his coat, and she thought he looked too pale than what was perhaps healthy. She supposed, standing out in the rain like that, it was probably natural, and when he glanced shyly in her direction she waved him over.

"Coffee?" she asked, cheerily when he neared the counter. "The weather's been terrible, recently, hasn't it?"

He looked at her with the faintest of smiles, thin hands fumbling through pockets for a wallet. Eventually, they came up to rest on the counter, trembling, and she noted the agitated way in which he clasped them. "They're like England's tears," he mumbled, strangely, in a voice that was hollow and low. "The rain, I mean."

Her grin waned, though she struggled to keep it alight. "That's interesting," she commented. "I've never thought of it that way. Are you a poet, perchance?"

He smiled, a thin one, but didn't answer. "Can I have a latte?" He asked instead.

She flushed, somewhat embarrassed, but complied without fuss. "Of course," she answered, plucking the five pound note from his fingers and dropping the change into his palm. His hands were almost white, and cold as ice to the touch. "Sorry, I get a little sidetracked, you see. My granddad was a poet. Or thought of himself as one, anyway. He wasn't much good, if I'm honest. I could never understand what it was he wrote."

He nodded, distantly, and stared into his hands. "Poets," he echoed. "Shakespeare. Donne." He looked at her. "I suppose I'm a poet, of sorts."

She gave what she hoped was a convincing 'hmm' as she busied herself with the coffee machine. "I was never much good at poetry," she confessed, and risked him a glance. His attention was focused upon the small, squat TV set in the corner of the room. She continued. "I liked literature, but I was never much good at it, so I gave up."

His glanced back at her then, briefly. "There used to be a lot of poets and playwrights in coffee houses." He said. "They come from all over, writers with novels, and we used to talk... We used to talk a lot about literature." His eyes glazed. "It was St. Michael's Alley. That was where London's first coffee house stood. Did you know that?"

She told him that she didn't, and suddenly he seemed more energetic. "It was in 1652," he told her, "when I had my first coffee. It was a Greek man who opened the stall. Back in those days, there were only alehouses and taverns. Coffee was a completely new product for us, and people flocked to see him. So many great minds came together in coffee houses, you know. We discussed new inventions and ideas and..." His voice faltered. "Britain was the envy of the world."

She nodded encouragingly and passed his coffee across the counter. He took it with a curt nod and sip. For a moment, all was quiet, and then he spoke again. "I'm frightfully sorry," he murmured, eyes lowered towards the ground. "I must be boring you."

"No, no. I love history." She told him kindly. "But I don't know how you can remember all this information. I can never remember dates, and that was where I lost marks in tests. They wanted you to write the dates, you see, and I could never get them."

He chuckled a little. "It's a bad system," he agreed. "The dates aren't important. Not really. But I can't seem to forget them." He stared into his steaming cup for a moment, then raised his head. "Would you like to hear more?"

She looked around. There was no one else waiting to be served, and no one more entering the shop. So she smiled, and obliged, and he began to speak.

Years on, she would wonder why she had, with such youth and innocence, not questioned him for the strange way he spoke. That alien association with all great events in history. The personal references to far off Royalty. The trenches of the war, the painful collapse of an empire... He spoke of it all with haunted eyes, and she wondered why she had not realised there and then that she was addressing the United Kingdom of Great Britain himself.

When he finally stopped, hand tight around a cooling cup, she was unable to speak with awe.

"How do you know -?" But he stopped the question on its tracks, and turned instead towards the TV set that had captured his attention previously. She thought he looked nervous, the same agitation that had been evident when he first entered.

"Switch on the telly." And she obeyed without question, because there was an urgency in his voice where there hadn't been previously. Suddenly, he looked almost frightened. Fingers were tight against the counter and all his focus were drawn upon the small screen before him. "The news. Put on the news. I haven't talked to her in ages. I don't know..." He sounded a little desperate. "I don't know if... I don't know what's been happening."

"Is it important?" she asked, becoming agitated herself. But he ignored her, or perhaps simply didn't hear, so she became quiet, and they watched with bated breath as the announcements came on, one after the other.

"I told her I didn't want anymore of it," he said, perhaps to himself, or perhaps to her, she wasn't quite sure. "You saw what happened at the Falklands. They hate us. Hate the British Empire. God, and I was so proud of it." He buried his face in his hands and rocked a little. "The sun never sets on the British Empire, you've heard of all that, haven't you? Well, it's bloody setting now, since there's not much of it left, is there?"

She was surprised by his emotions, and though she knew of the decolonisation which had been occurring all over the empire, and of the political independence of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, she had never given it much thought. Only the elderly still clung to the fantastical dreams of a global empire, she had thought. Everyone else knew that Britain had been losing control ever since the end of the second world war.

And power was just not something that mattered very much to the normal citizens of Britain. Not anymore.

"We're negotiating with the Chinese for Hong Kong, aren't we?" she tried to suggest to him.

He scoffed at her, arms wrapped tightly across his chest, as though he were falling apart and had to physically restrain his body within his coat. "China," he muttered, as though the word were a curse. "No way. There's no hope. It's all just one big joke and I'm the punchline." He laughed humourlessly as, upon the screen, the prime minister stumbled down the steps of the Chinese embassy. "Dear lady, look at it. This is the end of an era that we are witnessing." He shuddered. "God, it hurts. Every bloody time."

She tried to console him with another charge of coffee, and he gulped the liquid down as though the scalding heat was nothing. "Maybe it's better for all of us," she suggested, positively. "Maybe we can just concentrate on our home affairs from now on, and leave the other nations to run themselves." Idly, she stroked the counter, and continued. "It's tiring for all of us, the suppressors and the suppressed. It might be better if we stopped caring."

His expression became incredulous, his eyes furiously wide and his knuckles baring white bones. "And I suppose tomorrow, regardless, you'll still be running your shop," he stated, acidly. And then the anger rolled out, unrestrained and wild like the last roar of a dying lion. "God dammit, woman! 500 years ago you told me I would be a King! Now I'm just a suppressor, a dictator, _a monster_! What was it all for? Why did I...? Why did _we_...?"

She was unable to react, so swift was his mood, and outside, the rain only seemed to fall harder, and it was into this storm that the man turned and ran into. And then she saw his emerald tears - like the tears of England - glittering brightly as it fell into the night.

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><p>It was years until she would see him again.<p>

At this point she had aged, and though she had advanced and dabbled in other areas, it was to her coffee shop that she eventually returned to. Standing behind the counter, chatting vacantly with her customers who had entered, she sometimes reminisced of her strange customer, and wondered occasionally, whether he had been real. It was all too easy to dismiss him as a fantasy, a dreamy image concocted by a mind that had been dulled by a Sunday afternoon. And for a while, she had convinced herself of his fantastical existence - a figment of the imagination, a plot point in a novel.

Then he came back.

There was no rain this time, but an overcast of heavy, grey clouds that the people of England had long since grown accustomed to. He moved as he had, so many years ago, with leisure and ease, and when the bell jingled, she was struck by the youth and features that had remained so unhindered through the years. Where she had wrinkled and greyed, there was, perhaps, only those painful emotions in his eyes that hinted at the passing of the years.

He nodded awkwardly to her as he entered, his face flushing red under her astonished gaze. She found herself wondering why no one else was looking, but realised promptly that no one else remembered their history. Could not have known that, decades ago, they had stood exactly as they did now, except he was a man untouched by time, and she was only a trembling old woman unable to respond.

Except she did. "Coffee?" The words squeaked out, high and unnatural in her surprise.

Yet both were grateful for the distraction, and, relaxing, he nodded and moved towards the counter. She flinched back as he approached, but steadying herself, managed another question. "What would you like?"

He was taking out his wallet, but unlike their last encounter, he was no longer shaking, and his hands no longer so deathly pale. "Latte," he said, simply, and when he put the note in her hand, she was surprised to feel the warm, almost gentle fingers, that touched her palm lightly through the exchange.

"Keep the change," he said, when she began to look through her drawer. "It's for the second coffee, last time. I never paid you for it."

She allowed herself to stop for a moment, gazing into his emerald eyes that had changed so little and yet so much from their last encounter. "I thought I'd made you up," she mumbled, a little embarrassed. "It'd... It'd been a while, you know. And I'm really getting old. I didn't think... Well, it felt a little surreal, and my memory's never been all that good. I didn't think any of it had happened. I'd convinced myself, you know..."

"You told me you couldn't remember dates," he commented, dryly.

"Yes, yes..." She brushed a strand of hair distractedly out of her eyes, and turned towards the coffee machine. It had been replaced since, and she had mastered the new technology with relative ease, though now she could not seem to recall how to work it. "I was never good at history... But you were good with dates and places, weren't you?"

"I like to think I am," he said. There was a dry humour in his words that seemed to be a real part of his personality. "But I would have found you regardless, I think, even if you had moved. As long as you are a child of England, I think I will remember."

She didn't know how to respond to that, and he dipped his head as though slightly embarrassed. Neither spoke then, even when the steaming cup was exchanged. She half hoped that he would move, and perhaps he did too, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other as though he could not decide.

And when he did speak, he was very quiet. So quiet that she almost missed the apology that tumbled out from his mouth.

"... bad manners on my behalf," he was mumbling, his head lowered. "I was... not myself that day, and I hated to think that we should part on such terrible terms." Again, he was struck by his manner of speaking. He addressed her with the tone of an old gentleman, a mannerism that did not suit his youthful features. "Dear lady," he said - and she seemed to recall him addressing her this way before - "will you forgive me for my blunder?"

She felt a little breathless. She really was old. "Yes." She said, and without realising a cloud that had shadowed her lifted. Her smile had never felt so easy. "Yes, of course. I never really thought anything of it, you know. It wasn't really... It was just an ordinary day, for me. I hope _you_ weren't worrying, all this time."

He chuckled, but she didn't know what was so amusing her response. "You're too kind, dear lady," he said. "But it was ungentlemanly of me, and to _you_, in particular. I would never have forgiven myself." He smiled a smile of memories. "We made an empire together."

She didn't know how to respond, but he didn't seem to mind. "Do you remember the days we spent talking about poetry?" He asked her, or perhaps someone else, for his words were not relevant to her. "You had some great writers in your era, and I was so proud." He shook his head. "Shakespeare. Donne. You recited it to me, sometimes, and sometimes I would tell myself that..."

She stared at him, but he was fading. "Sometimes," he sighed, quiet, sad, "I still tell myself... '_No man is an island, entire of itself...'_" His fingers clenched around his cup. "'_... And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee...' _Elizabeth."

She could sense it then, and too late came the questions she should have asked earlier. _Who are you? _What_ are you? How do you know my name? How can you know who I am? How can you know...?_

But he was gone, and in the reflection of the empty cup she knew that they would never meet again.

Outside, the tears of England fell, and she wondered if that was his first farewell.

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><p><strong>AN:** Here are some historical notes for any geeks out there who, like me, adore history:

The First British Empire began with Elizabeth I and her interest in discovery and overseas exploration, though in my opinion it was James VI who truly established the foundations of the empire. Until the loss of the Thirteen States in the American War of Independence, this was known as the First British Empire, and, even after America's independence, Britain would be able to enjoy over a century of almost unchallenged authority, following the defeat of Napoleonic France. At the peak of its power, it was known as the empire in which 'the sun never sets'.

However, after the horrific events of WWII, there began a process of decolonisation whereupon country after country declared their independence and the great empire began to fall apart, and in 1997, the last of Britain's major overseas territory, Hong Kong, was transferred back to China. The handover ceremony, broadcast from 30th June to the 1st July, marked for many, 'the end of an empire'.

The poem, as recited and abbreviated by England, is called 'No Man is an Island', by John Donne, an Elizabethan poet. I'd first heard of it quoted in the episode 'Official Secrets' in the British sitcom Yes Prime Minister. I thought it was fitting somehow. The end of an era, a great empire, a dynasty.

_No man is an island,_  
><em>Entire of itself,<em>  
><em>Every man is a piece of the continent,<em>  
><em>A part of the main.<em>  
><em>If a clod be washed away by the sea,<em>  
><em>Europe is the less.<em>  
><em>As well as if a promontory were.<em>  
><em>As well as if a manor of thy friend's<em>  
><em>Or of thine own were:<em>  
><em>Any man's death diminishes me,<em>  
><em>Because I am involved in mankind,<em>  
><em>And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; <em>  
><em>It tolls for thee<em>

And that's that. I hope you enjoyed, dear readers, and that it was understandable. I don't know quite know what I feel about it. :/ I might even delete it. Please give me your honest thoughts. It will be very much appreciated.

Thank you for reading.


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